I bought the Cameo in 1996 from
a guy in Everett. I was driving through town and saw it so I
followed him to a auto parts store and asked him if he would
sell the truck. He said he was going to Canada to look at a
Corvette and if he bought it he would sell the truck. It was
a driver with a 6 cylinder and a hydromatic transmission.

My Dad has restored several Mercury
cars and one day said lets do your truck so we did. It took
two years and it was alot of fun. My Dad did all of the paint
and body work. I had the frame done by Wayne Due in Marysville.
We used a clip from RB and then it has Monte Carlo front end
parts. The motor was built by Street and Performance in Arkansas
and the Transmission is a 700R. I used birdseye maple in the
bed to have something different and a custom leather interior.
We did all of the work in my Dads shop so that makes it even
more special. I have enjoyed being in the club and have met
alot of great people. I did have the truck at the GoodGuys last
year but i made the mistake of parking inside. I will be there
this year and I will be outside. Matt

Birdseye Maple bed

1955 Chevrolet Cameo
Carrier History

The 1955 Chevrolet Cameo Carrier
was a light-duty truck designed with the flair of a passenger car.
As Chuck Jordan remembers, "In our earliest designs, the bodysides
ran back flush into the pickup box. The cab and the box were all
tied in. There was no seam, no gap. But then Chevrolet came along
and said, no, you can't do it that way, because there'll be too
much body torquing, and tying the whole thing together will wrinkle
the sheetmetal.

The 1955 Cameo Carrier, Model 3124,
came painted only in Bombay Ivory with Commercial Red
accents.

"So we redesigned it and put
in that gap between the cab and the box. There's a kind of overlapping
flange and a chrome strip that fills in the seam. I think they told
us we had to have ¾-inch of clearance. The gap looked huge to us,
but when the average person sees the truck, he probably doesn't
really notice the gap.

"Anyway, the Cameo turned out
to be something extra, something beyond the ordinary. It was the
first time Chevrolet had done anything like it. And we knew this
would never be a high-volume seller. We didn't expect to sell a
lot of Cameos, and low volume meant fiberglass. That's how they
got into the fiberglass parts. Fiberglass let us afford the program.
We had the Corvette to thank for that. The Corvette blazed that
trail."

The smooth-sided Cameo Carrier carried
a conventional steel stepside box hidden inside fiberglass outer
skins. The fenders, tailgate, and spare-tire carrier were all formed
from fiberglass and attached with concealed fasteners to the exterior
of the pickup box. The faired-in vertical taillamps were unique
to the Cameo, and the tailgate swung down on cables that retracted
via hidden, spring-loaded pulleys.

The red-and-white theme was continued
inside the 1955 Cameo Carrier.

All fiberglass pieces were supplied
by the same company that fabricated the Corvette body: Moulded Fiberglas
of Ashtabula, Ohio. And like early Corvettes, the Cameo Carrier
came in only one color scheme: Bombay Ivory with Commercial Red
window accents, and a red-and-beige vinyl interior. The inside walls
of the pickup box were also painted red.

Chevrolet continued the Cameo Carrier
into early 1958. Depending on the year, prices ranged about $350
to $475 higher than those of Chevy's basic ½-ton pickups, and total
Cameo production came to 10,321, approximately half of which was
sold during the short 1955 season.

But the significance of the Cameo
Carrier wasn't its sales record; it was the halo effect it had on
all Chevrolet trucks. The Cameo Carrier was to Chevrolet trucks
what the Corvette was to passenger cars -- an attention getter and
brand focal point.

Observes Jordan: "Of course,
the influence of the Cameo was considerable. Shortly after we introduced
it, Dodge brought out a pickup with a fleetside box [for 1957],
and from then on all trucks became available with smooth sides.
So the Cameo, which didn't sell in great numbers because it carried
a relatively high price, started the trend toward flush-sided pickup
boxes."